Flight Test Engineer

Voltair; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 100,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Voltair is hiring a Flight Test Engineer in San Francisco to build and validate test fixtures and hardware for flying drones used in enterprise deployments. You will work with hardware, software, and operations teams, traveling about one week each month to support field missions.

You’ll be the 7th full-time Voltair employee, taking on flight testing responsibilities from the CEO within the first months and deploying drones for customer contracts within 90 days of arrival.

Qualifications

• Has built drones in hobby or professional setting and understands electrical systems on drones.
• Experience with autopilot firmware (ArduPilot, PX4, or similar).
• 1+ years of related professional experience.
• Good instincts for airmanship and risk management.

Skills

Drone building

Autopilot firmware

Airmanship & risk management

Professional experience

Tools

ArduPilot/PX4 firmware

Job description

Voltair

Autonomous Drones for Earth Observation

• $100 - $160


• 0.50% - 1.50%


• San Francisco, CA, US

Job type Full-time

Role Engineering, Hardware

Experience 1+ years

Visa US citizen/visa only

About the role

About Voltair

Voltair is building the world’s first distributed network of drones for earth observation. We envision a world where after a major storm, an operator of critical infrastructure can simply sign into our platform and dispatch a drone. Within minutes, we will identify high risk hazards and stream issues directly to crews on the ground. With our ground stations and long range drones, we can cover the continental U.S. with only ~5000 stations.

We operate as a full stack service, meaning we build drones, deploy them, capture data, analyze it, and deliver the results on our software platform. Our first market is power utilities. We’ve serviced multiple utilities already, and are preparing for our biggest deployment with a large multinational utility later this year.

The Role

We’re looking for a Flight Test Engineer who is equally comfortable soldering a wiring harness on the bench and operating a 54lb fixed‑wing aircraft in the field. This is not a pure R&D flight-test role and it's not a pure operations role, it's both. You'll build and validate the test fixtures and hardware that keep our flying robots reliable, and you'll deploy with that same hardware to fly real missions for large enterprise customers.

You’ll work closely with our hardware, software, and operations teams, and you’ll be one of the people customers see in the field representing Voltair.

We expect this role to travel about ~1 week every month.

You’ll be the 7th full time employee of Voltair. On day 1 we’ll begin transitions of all flight testing responsibilities from our CEO to you. Drone manufacturing will follow shortly thereafter. Within 90 days of your arrival, we expect you’ll be deploying our drone for customer contracts.

Qualifications & Experiences

Required

• Has built drones in hobby or professional setting and understands electrical systems on drones


• Experience with autopilot firmware (ArduPilot, PX4, or similar)


• 1+ years of related professional experience


• Good instincts for airmanship and risk management

Nice to Have

• Manned aviation experience (private pilot or higher)


• Experience running structured flight test plans or test campaigns


• FAA Part 107 licensed

About Voltair

We build drones with unlimited range (by recharging on power lines). The grid is the world’s largest machine. Thus, we can collect data anywhere, anytime. We're selling a full‑stack inspection service to power utilities by delivering reports with annotated photos of equipment that is broken or at risk. Our mission is to find faults and other maintenance concerns before they spark wildfires. Today power utilities are our customer, but tomorrow they'll be our deployment partner. At scale we are a new infrastructure layer for data on the physical world.